Ambush at the Courthouse

Shortly before dawn one day last week, while riots in the Puerto Rican section of Camden, N.J., were diverting the local police, eight men and women stole into the federal offices in the courthouse. They were determined to steal or destroy FBI documents and federal draft records. Instead, they stepped into a well-laid trap. Three floors below the Government offices, a team of FBI agents awaited their furtive entrance. By the time the roundup was completed, the agents had nabbed the eight intruders as well as 20 of their confederates who had been assigned various sentinel and communications tasks outside the court house. All were indicted on charges of conspiracy to loot federal offices in Camden. Among those apprehended were two Roman Catholic priests, Peter Fordi, 34, of New York City, and Michael J. Doyle, 37, of Camden; a Lutheran minister, Milo M. Billman, 39, of Camden; seven women, none over 26, and the mastermind of the peace movement's self-styled "Commandos," John Peter Grady.

Painstaking Precautions. The Camden raid was carried off with such devastating precision that one defense attorney termed it "not an arrest, but an ambush." Coupled with the arrest of five alleged conspirators in Buffalo, N.Y., it may have broken the spine of the Berrigan-centered segment of the antiwar movement. The Berrigan brothers themselves are in federal prisons awaiting an October trial in Harrisburg, Pa., on charges of conspiring to blow up federal buildings and kidnap Henry Kissinger.

Known as "Quicksilver" among the Berrigan forces, Grady, 46, is an unkempt father of five who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, majored in sociology at Manhattan College and used to sell insurance. But there was nothing disheveled about Grady's anti-Government operations. He watched a Government office or building for months before he sent his crew into action. He charted the flow of traffic and the movements of guards or watchmen around his target. He has used as many as 50 antiwar activists on a single job. He schooled them in techniques of lock picking and window smashing. Only when he was convinced by his notes, charts and diagrams that nothing had been left to chance did Grady give the word to break and enter.

No one knows where the Bronx-born Grady learned the intricacies of his trade (he has no criminal record), but he has been part of the Berrigan movement from the beginning. In April, shortly after Grady began organizing the Camden operation, the FBI began to zero in on him.

Certain that he was being followed, Grady took painstaking precautions, backtracking over routes and calling his wife only from a pay phone near their Bronx home. Agents spotted him in Camden in June, noted that he had been keeping the courthouse under surveillance, and started keeping an eye on him. Their observations also revealed that Grady had set up his command post in the home of Dr. William Anderson, a Camden osteopath who surrendered to the FBI the day after the roundup.

In one room of the Anderson home, Grady kept wall charts of the flow of activity around the courthouse. He broke the area down into six zones, which his spotters watched each night before dictating their observations into tape recorders. They managed to view and record every important detail except the presence of the FBI agents watching their observation posts.

Defection. Another, spectacular flaw in Grady's plan was a defection in his 'Usually loyal ranks. In June he recruited a local businessman, Robert Hardy, 32, a liberal ex-Marine who had no clear notion of what Grady's scheme was all about. Hardy was shocked to learn that he would be expected to violate Government property. Instead of studying the locks on the courthouse doors, as Grady had instructed, Hardy went to the Bureau and spilled the plot to agents.

That was all the help they needed. When Grady first scheduled the mission for the night of Aug. 7, the FBI was ready with its stakeout. But Grady, who was beginning to show signs of strain, irritably called off the break-in because of garbled signals on his sentinels' walkie-talkies. A week later, dissatisfied with the performance of his lookouts, Grady scrubbed the mission again. This almost caused a mutiny, and the insurrectionists delivered an ultimatum: the night of Aug. 21 or the show was off. Grady ordered his raiders into action, then retired to the home of the Rev. Billman (Grady's style is to avoid the action) to soothe his nerves with a bit of electronic rock. He and Billman were caught wholly by surprise when the FBI moved in. "They came like they'd found all the escaped murderers of the last six years," said the embittered Billman. He and Grady, like the rest of the group, are unrepentant. Billman summed up their feelings: "Violence against paper clips, paper and file cabinets is much less drastic than violence against the people of Viet Nam."

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